The whole Pulseaudio business...

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Morgan Krieg
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The whole Pulseaudio business...

Post by Morgan Krieg »

Every time when I install a new Linux Mint, I have to uninstall pulseaudio and install alsa or something like that. From what I see, quite a lot of people has problems with pulseaudio. It would be really nice if there would be some application or something like that for enabling and disabling sound systems without doing all the searching the web for how to and then copy-pasting all that stuff into the terminal.
squeezy

Re: The whole Pulseaudio business...

Post by squeezy »

What kind of problems do you have that make you remove Pulseaudio?
Morgan Krieg
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Re: The whole Pulseaudio business...

Post by Morgan Krieg »

For some weird reason it was using my CPU and sound would stop working correctly when multiple applications are playing sound. Never had such a thing happen with ALSA.
jgmiller

Re: The whole Pulseaudio business...

Post by jgmiller »

Morgan Krieg wrote:Every time when I install a new Linux Mint, I have to uninstall pulseaudio and install alsa or something like that.
This is a very common misconception which has been propagated by many people, particularly on the Ubuntu forums.

PulseAudio runs on top of ALSA. If ALSA was not installed then PulseAudio would not run at all.

Therefore you cannot replace PulseAudio by installing ALSA, you can just choose to run your sound applications via the ALSA "layer" rather than through PulseAudio running on top of ALSA, which its-self consists of a user layer alsalib running on top of ALSA kernel modules specific to the chips in your sound devices(s).

In a very simplified representation --

PulseAudio
|
ALSA library
|
ALSA kernel modules
|
hardware sound devices

PulseAudio also provides networking features to send sound from an application running on one PC to a PulseAudio server running on another PC.

Many common PulseAudio problems (but not all) are due to poor configuration of the underlying ALSA sound devices (eg USB sound devices need to be properly ordered so that the preferred default is card0) and the improper selection of which ALSA sound device to use for input and output.
Paul Burnside

Re: The whole Pulseaudio business...

Post by Paul Burnside »

In general I don't have problems with my audio except that I am trying to connect Xoscope to the onboard audio and it won't work.
any suggestion on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
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Pilosopong Tasyo
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Re: The whole Pulseaudio business...

Post by Pilosopong Tasyo »

The OP's last post to this thread was well over a year ago. The issue may no longer be relevant now and/or it has been fixed and/or the thread has been abandoned.

Nevertheless, thread moved from Other Edition Support ‹ About Mint Editions and locked as per §2.3 and §2.2, respectively, of the Forum Rules, Guidelines, and Policy.
o Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime!
o If an issue has been fixed, please edit your first post and add the word [SOLVED].
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